


time beneath our feet

by kandeya



Category: Bastion (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 06:41:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8613250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kandeya/pseuds/kandeya
Summary: the past lingers in the present for the inhabitants of the Bastion.





	1. Chapter 1

When the Kid was younger, growing up by the docks in the Wharf District with longshoremen's boys and sailors' bastards, he asked his mother where his father had gone.

"I got one, right?" he asked, already brusque for his age, staring down at his knobbly knees.

His mum's hands were stained with flour, he remembers, dark flour for cheap flatbread that tasted of salt and herb. It was enough. It was never enough.

"You do. Everyone's got a father, silly." She smiles, eyes lingering on the purpling bruise that paints her child's round cheekbone. Already, she can see the muscles starting to cord in his shoulders, already, she sees the alertness that marks his step, more than the Caelondian sightseers come to play at the beach. "But you know, he's not _all_ you are, so don't you worry. You won't be like he is, no matter what they say. Not while I'm here."

Her smile broadens, a near-grin. "Give mama a kiss."

The Kid tries to laugh scornfully, but it comes out light and abashed, and he hugs her tighter this time, before he heads back out.

His mum sits down after sending him off, wiping flour-colored hands absently onto her apron, chest tightening as she suppresses another cough. The lung-sickness is starting to take more people down in the docks -- _ill wind_ , they call it, and the rumor's that it's an Ura plague, that it's the Gods, that it's the City folk.

She doesn't want him to worry -- she knows he doesn't go to school like the well-dressed Central District children whose houses she cleans to a bright sheen. The docks, the warships, they demanded a different learning, one that a Central school would never give him, snow-haired 'fugee that he was.

She didn't know much Caelondian, spoke it slowly, pronouncing carefully. The Kid didn't take to the book, but he was scrapping through his life with more kindness in him than she could have hoped for. He was a good child, and she was happy to be his mother.

 

* * *

 

Her Kid's accent is already slipping into the nasally drawl of the Brushers and the ex-army folk who she sees sometimes at the Sole Regret, and while she mourns not knowing how to teach him her language, she figures it does a body no good to have no one else in town to talk to.

She feels death seizing her breaths, and tries again to breathe easily. _Just a little longer. Just for the kid, please, if you're still alive. If you listen, Mother, to your children still._

Her chest loosens, slowly but surely. She spits into the basin, no tinge of red this time.

Small mercies.

 

* * *

 

The next day, the Kid turns seventeen, and proudly announces to his mother that he has a real job now. She studies his face carefully this time, absorbing his joy, until she hears "...they said the best money-paying position was out on the Rippling Walls."

"The Walls?" she gasps, involuntarily, and coughs, a throaty and wet racking fit. It's more frequent now. Kid's by her side instantly, his face a childish frown as he rubs warm hands up and down her side and back, trying to relieve her pain.

She remembers the Walls, of course, the Harrowing of the Hounds that led the last of her village -- if she'd only known now that it was the last of her _people_ altogether -- to Caelondia, the Walls rising forbidden and forlorn ahead of them, as they died, as they trudged through melting snow and mud, all to make it to the walls and the City.

"We could use the money, Ma," he says, softly. His puts his calloused hand in hers, wrapping her up in their thickest blanket. She squeezes it back with what strength she can muster. It's been hard, ever since the lung-sickness rendered her to bed. The war's made medicine scarce; death is a constant visitor to the docks.

She gazes sleepily at him as he stokes the fire, and he squares his shoulders straight as he leans back in the old rocking chair and stares contemplatively out the cracked window.

The next day, she wakes to find a hand-scrawled note: _Don't worry bout me, Ma. I'll be back before you know it._ Her kid never learned to properly sign his name -- a permanently ink-stained thumb was proof of that much -- but there's a scratchy stick-figure drawing of a sunflower and the City Crest in the corner. She folds the piece of paper, keeps it close to her heart.

 

* * *

 

The Kid finds it, yellowed, the ink faded, when he finally comes back from the Wall, bearing the City Crest and the standard-issue carbine on his back, the Cael Hammer in his hand. The house is empty, and his feet track trails through the dust thick on the warped floorboards.

The paper is thin in his fingers, the edges crumbling.

That night, he goes to the potter's field out on the sandbar, where the waves from the Boundless Sea meet the shore. No names here for the dead, only plots marked with years of death, and the Kid cannot guess. His mother's letters were only full of concern for him, advice to eat well, to sleep right. There weren't many who wrote letters anymore, not on the Walls, not for him, not for their snow-haired demon.

Salt fills his nostrils, salt and the sharp tang of sadness, and the Kid makes sure to set his hammer down gently when he finally sits sleepless at the corner of the field, watching the entrance hungrily -- gentleness is hard to come to him these days, but in the presence of his mother's ghost he cannot help but try.

 

* * *

 

Yaksha, they came to call him on the Walls in his first tour. A Marshal was the first.

The Marshal had been sent to receive him when he came back from his first scout in the Wild, blood and dirt smeared all over his face, his eyes gleaming in a feral light, a Brusher's Pike in one hand, and the knapsack of an Ura scout in the other.

Yaksha, the Demon. He was a bulky brawler of a kid when he first came to the walls, but fists broke no stone.

The Marshals put the Cael Hammer in his hands, and told him to get to work.


	2. songs of the sea

"Your voice," the boy says, "is lovely." Zia's pale skin goes pink, and her fingers slip on the harp she's carrying, discordant notes breaking the melody she was composing.

"Stop saying that," she mumbles, not unhappily, and pushes her companion's arm. They're strolling down by the seashore, looking for the pale-blue shells that are all the rage in Central right now.

Her papa doesn't like it when she heads out like this, but today at school was history class, and today's lesson, all sections and classes, was on the Ura-Caelondian War. People don't forget. They won't let her forget it either. She was crying on the preschoolers' swing set when he found her.

Today, in other words, was a day for sun and fine sand, the smell of salt waves by the promenade.

 

* * *

 

Her companion stumbles as someone bumps into him, and he lifts his voice in annoyance. "Hey! Hey, you! Kid!"

The kid -- Zia can't think of him as anything else -- is in a ragged gray overcoat, and dark loose trousers, all of which seem to shrink him down further. His skin is tanned dark in the ocean sun, like all Caels', but his hair is an impossible bone-white. A bright red bandanna, incongruously made of soft fine silk, is wrapped around his neck.

_Is he sick?_ Zia thinks dumbly. Hair that white, skin that bronzed brown -- he seems an altogether impossible thing.

"What's it?" the kid growls in an unfriendly voice, and Zia presses a hand into her companion's shoulder. A fight would _definitely_ have Papa grounding her for a week. Maybe a month.

His muscles tense under her grip slightly before slackening. "Rude to knock into people like that, _kid._ "

The kid is silent, considering him, before nodding meekly. "'pologize then." He turns away from them.

It's only later, when they're scrounging for change to pay for some vineapple-flavored cotton candy; it's only then that they realize his wallet is gone.

They run back to the docks, but the kid's long gone, and nobody's seen anyone with bone-white hair. They laugh ruefully, and the boy shakes his head in mock dejection.

Zia unfurls her long striped scarf, setting it out in front of her. She taps her foot once-twice, counting beats, and begins to play her harp. He claps jauntily at the passerby.

By day's end they've eaten so much cotton candy and pulled taffy with her earnings that she forgets about the kid completely. It is, she thinks, the happiest day of her life so far.

 

* * *

 

"What's your name?" Zulf asks, screwing together the last bits of his courage. He hopes he hasn't offended her.

She smiles at him, and he suddenly feels at ease. _Gods above,_ he thinks to himself.

"Talia."

 

* * *

 

"Mornin', Venn," Rucks says as he sets his gear -- City Crest and Cael Hammer -- by the wall of the lab.

Venn grunts unhappily at him.

"Aw, give a guy somethin' to go on, then," Rucks jokes good naturedly, before settling at his desk, staring at the blueprints.

His specialty is defensive construction -- the Walls are still his glory -- but the Council has been making war rumblings of late. Funding more exploratory weaponry, cutting back on defensive training, except for the Rippling Walls that face outwards towards the Terminals.

Rucks thinks they're crying gasfella tears there -- there's no _reason_ , in his coolly logical mind, that they would want to go back to that horrible detente with the Ura. Peace is prosperity.

Venn, meanwhile, is staring at a letter on his desk, bearing the Council's seal.

Rucks is absorbed in his task of figuring out reinforcements for the eastern Walls -- the rumblings from the Brushers at Mount Zand are far from pleasing -- and doesn't see Venn tear the envelope open, and then, after a few minutes, tear the letter itself into tiny pieces, scattering them like so much confetti on the ground.

"Why you think we went to war?" he says to Rucks then, tired, so tired.

Rucks doesn't answer, and Venn sighs, but before he can leave for the daily debrief, Rucks says, "We thought we didn't have time. Time to take root. Time to learn. Thought we had to burn the brightest, the fastest. Thought we'd lost it all with the Motherland, and we weren't going to lose it again."

"It was _ours_ ," Venn says, sadly. "Point Lemaign, the Far Fields. It was _home._ "

"It was," Rucks agrees, sadly.

The unspoken _but not anymore_ lingers in the air between the Cael and the Ura.

Venn shuffles his papers, needing something -- _anything_ \-- to do with his hands, and heads out for the debrief.

 

* * *

 

"You the new recruit?" The bright-eyed Marshal stares down at the kid slouching over the ramparts, old repeater in hand, a kid whose bone-white hair casts an eerie glow in the morning light.

"'sir," he mumbles sleepily, straightening his stance and lowering his repeater. He's kitted in some new plate armor and gauntlets -- the Mancers were testing out some experimental alloys again, though he'd never tell his soldiers that.

"Recruit?"

"Yessir," the kid says again, louder. The Marshal sighs, but he doesn't doubt the kid's strength -- the physical requirements for touring the Walls are, even in peacetime, brutal beyond compare. He can't have the kid thinking that he's beyond reproach, though.

"Windbags are makin' a ruckus down at West Gate. Use that." He points to a modified Cael Hammer that Toubron, the Giant, had last used. Used before he was cut down by guerillas, scouting too close to the old Ura villages at Point Lemaign.

The hammer was sent back, proper postage paid and everything. Ura were an honorable sort, after all.

The hammer's head is a right armor-buster. He wonders if the kid can wield it.

If he hesitates, the Marshal's prepared to give him a cursory reprimand -- something about _staying alert and alive_ or some such -- and let him off. But the kid straightens, considering the Hammer, and pads over, his steel-toed regulation boots thudding heavily on the Wall stone.

Wordlessly, the kid bends over and sets his hands in a grip more suited for an uppercut strike on the long handle, before lurching back, digging a boot into unyielding stone for better grip. He lifts the hammer, only slightly wobbly in his stance, and brings it down on the pile of rocks, crushing them to gravel-sized pieces instantly.

Dust hangs in the air, sticking to the Marshal's skin, flecks of gray-white in his red hair. The kid grunts approvingly, and without another word to his superior, hefts the hammer square over his shoulders, and heads for the West Gate.

 

* * *

 

"Kid, you're going out to the Wild. Reports comin' out that way of scouts from the Terminals." The red-haired Marshal's voice is gruff, but kind. "Ever used a carbine?"

"Nosir." The kid's always mumbling, for some reason, like he never quite learned how to speak in proper company. But he's also never caught the kid in a lie, and the Marshal can appreciate that.

"Gonna have to learn on the way then." He tosses the shotgun to the kid, who catches it easily and checks the loading mechanism. The turn on the Wall has made him leaner and darker, bleached his bone-white hair to a grimy shine -- it's hard to believe he was ( _is_ , if the stuffed envelopes he carefully scrawls an address on for mail days are any indication) -- an unschooled brat straight from the docks.

"Breakers heading out soon for a last drink at the Sole Regret, a pair -- Wulf and Reese. Go with them." The kid nods perfunctorily, fingers running up and down the stock.

He straps the carbine to his back and hefts the hammer -- his hammer properly, now that he's modified it in the Wall's Forge to suit his needs -- over his shoulders.

The Marshal doesn't know it then, but that's the last day he'll think of the kid as the kid.

 

* * *


	3. the prayers of point lemaign

Wulf and Reese are nice, the kid thinks. They sing in rich voices, they finish each other's jokes and crack wise with the old bartender who keeps the Sole Regret half-functional. They're boisterous, lively. It makes him feel warm inside. They don't get many like these two on the Walls.

Reese passes the kid a bottle, smiles right at him. "Werewhiskey!" he shouts. "Old man here told me it brings the dead back to life!" The kid sniffs at it experimentally, and Wulf slaps him heartily on the back.

"Keep it for the trip, kid, we all got to keep our spirits up."

 

* * *

 

The kid's the one who goes out to the Wild, Yaksha's the one who comes back.

It's an old tradition; everyone on the Walls who serves long enough -- or hard enough -- gets a nickname. Sometimes that nickname's their only name. Sometimes it's a warning, like Red Gouge and his troupe of vicious Brushers who stick heads on their pikes, display them on the walls for the 'fugees to see.

Sometimes it's just a name -- Toubron, the Giant. Mayer, the Millstone.

Yaksha gets his name from the Marshal who has to retrieve him, alone, from South Gate and sit him down for a debrief. Tell him in short order why what he did still mattered, even if both the Breakers he was with were long dead by now.

The name's a High Ura word, he later finds out -- it's a name, the first name on the Walls maybe, that came from the Ura themselves.

 

* * *

 

Ten days ago, Wulf and Reese were sent out to find the Ura Scouts sneaking rail blueprints back to the Terminals.

Nonviolent confrontation, the mission parameters emphasized. Pack light. Council just wants the plans back. Soon as possible.

The only one who'd come somewhat properly armed was the kid with his carbine and the hammer, and he was meant to be the bait for the Wild's pests more than anything. Clear paths of debris, blast through giant pecker nests and patches of stabweed, the sort of work that would be distracting to veteran Breakers looking for Ura spies hidden in the swamp and the shadow.

Unimportant work, really.

Until the Wild, and the Ura, fought back.

 

* * *

 

The kid never speaks of what happened when they hit Point Lemaign, not even to his debriefing Marshal -- it isn't until some of Jina's Breaker troop goes to retreive Wulf and Reese's bodies for their families that they can begin to piece together what happened at all.

_Snow demon!_ the Ura scout screamed, seeing the white fluff of a Breaker's winter cap. Some fine bow-work from Jina's second and the scout was crippled, trembling, still alive.

Jina repeats his words back to him. "Snow demon?" she asks, sharply. All that's left of Wulf and Reese are their bones, which her troop reverently collect into a black sack. Lungblossom acid and the fetid swamp ate through the rest of them.

"Two weeks ago," the scout says in heavily accented Caelondian, mesmerized by the stained white fur of her regulation winter headgear. "Breakers like you. And one other. _Yuru yaksha_ , the snow demon. At _Karakash_. You call it Point Lemaign."

 

* * *

 

Something cold passes through Jina, seeing the fear that lingers in the scout's eyes. "We won't hurt you. But you are under arrest, and you will be taken back to Caelondia. Tell me more about the demon."

White hair, snow-white, bone-white, the scout says, and stained with blood. We thought we could break him.

He smelled of alcohol and soot. He smelled of death. He smelled of _our_ death.

The other Breakers, we killed them. Took their weapons. The demon had nothing. Nothing but an old pike, some old Slinger's he pulled from the swamp we ambushed them in.

He wouldn't go down, though. We shot him with our crossbows. He stumbled, lay there, nothing but a bottle in his hand. Bottle and that half-rotted pike, all he had.

Pike was enough. Snarled like a beast, bit and stabbed and tore my comrade apart like one of the Wild Pack. Finally smashed that bottle into his head. Onma fell, he staggered like an old drunk man. He didn't get up again.

The demon looked at me, then. I...I have not seen eyes like that. Not for a long time.

He asked me who had the plans. I didn't. Onma was always so self-righteous. He took Onma's belongings. He left me alive. He didn't even think to touch me, so beneath him was I.

My superiors told me the things that are to be feared most in Point Lemaign are the ghosts of our ancestors and the bows of the Breakers.

Of that, I am not so sure anymore. I have seen the eyes of the _yuru yaksha_. Surely, surely, my end is near.

 

* * *

 

Jina exhales when the Ura scout falls silent. Tells one of her Breakers to split off and head for the Walls, they need to ask about the Yaksha. Proper scouts were getting rarer by the day.

She suppresses the shudder in her hands at the glazed look in the Ura scout's eyes as they tie him up and frogmarch him between two of their own. She tries to remind herself. _For the city, for the eternal city, always._

 

* * *

 

Across the city, in Central's Third District far from the Rippling Walls, Venn scratches out more calculations on his sheet, closes his eyes. He's close, he can tell, to figuring out the mix of stabilizing fluids that will keep the newfangled alloy the Mancers handed him from exploding on contact. _Build a weapon,_ they said. And here he is. Building instruments of death, again.

In the other room, he can hear Zia's light snores. She was more like her mother than him, quiet, more inclined to music than to microscope. But her skill with the old Ura harp was undeniable.

He wished he could find her better teachers, but for that they would have to request travel permits for the Terminals, and _that_ , he knew, would never end in his favor.

He did what he could, because he loved her so much. Left her the old Ura books of song the Mancers had locked away in their archives, for no good reason that he could discern. He took as many as he could stuff into his satchel, flashing his Mancer badge carelessly to the overworked clerk, rushing to catch the steam-tram back to his den before the Mancer librarian came back from break.

He had left the books at her bedroom door, couldn't even bring himself to go in.

He could never figure out what to say to his own flesh and blood. _I'm sorry,_ he thought, more than once. He tried the words on his tongue, and it felt choking. He never apologized to Zia.

Zia never asked him to.

He pressed the pen harder into the paper as he worked through the last set of fluid dynamics equations. _I'm a coward_ , he rues, listening to Zia breathe.

 

* * *

 

Zulf is typing out an address to the District Council -- a meeting has been called about the 'fugee situation, to check up on the Ura pass-holders. Again.

Reports from the Walls are worrying people again, Talia tells him one night. Worrying my folks too. Zulf looks at her sadly. He's never felt like he had to ask, but...

"Do you trust me?" He doesn't know if he can bear the answer.

Talia looks at him sternly, and frowns. His heart is in his mouth.

"Zulf." Her voice is sharp. He meets her eyes, sharp and searching.

"Of _course_ I trust you. More than I trust myself, some days." She wrings her hands, and it's only then that Zulf sees she's still in her staff uniform. Too tired to change out.

"The situation down in the camps is bad, Zulf. They're dying down there, because people up here are too scared to let them live in their midst."

She continues, sadly. "Just...I know Cael pride. I know we're a bitter bunch who can't let go of the War. But believe in us, Zulf. Believe in us to do the right thing, eventually."

Zulf hugs her to him, lets her burrow her face into his silks while he keeps writing. _I believe in you,_ he thinks. _In you, and in the city both._

 


End file.
